I thought it would be interesting to put down some thoughts on Conrad before tackling Nostromo, if for no other reason than to see how Donald’s and my impressions might change during the novel. (I’m particularly interested to hear what he thinks of teaching Conrad, though that’s very much up to him.) But beforehand, I should state my acquaintance with his works. I read Heart of Darkness in high school, as I imagine is a common experience; it’s odd to think of it as a ‘safe’ canonical work, but perhaps Chinua Achebe’s one essay has something to do with that and raises the question of reading it against the whole post-colonial grain. Beyond that, I’ve also read “The Secret Sharer”, “An Outpost of Progress” (along with Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”), Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes (taught as a ‘high modernist’ text), and a few scattered letters and essays of Conrad’s.
I find Conrad’s canonical status especially interesting given how higher it remains in Britain (or at least Oxford) than in America, and how mixed it is here. Normally authors rather than works, I think, enter canons: that is, a career somehow validates all the work even if, really, we’d rather not read the juvenilia presaging ‘late style’ and similar nonsense. That said, we’ve likely all read Heart of Darkness; how many of us have read Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent, Victory, Chance, “Typhoon” or – and perhaps for some glaring reasons – The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ though? So something interesting is at play, maybe something more than the ‘better-known-than-read’ phenomenon à la D.H. Lawrence, John Dos Passos, & co. I’d wonder myself if it doesn’t have something to do with the timing of Conrad’s career straddling two centuries – ‘transitional’ figures always seem hard to place – and whether he doesn’t quite fit into any movement, school, &c. There may be a bit of a Leavis-ite reaction after a ‘premature’ entrance into syllabi: Conrad as some great arbiter of morals is not someone I’d be immediately drawn to, for instance. Hell, I’d put those novels right next to Harriet Beecher Stowe for ‘sociological interest’ …. But that does a disservice to the guy.
I think of Conrad as an ‘impressionist’ and, above all else, as a conscious, foreign stylist of the language. The preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ has a lot to do with these ideas. There Conrad writes (among sundry other interesting things): “All art ... appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses.” Therefore, he continues, “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all to make you see!” (Author’s italics). What do I picture when I hear Conrad’s name, then? Sunsets on a coast, murky light at night, shadows in a jungle – a hazy sort of late nineteenth-century symbolism, really, that even carries on to the plot even to the cost of ready characterization. (Can any of us picture Marlowe’s face? And Nostromo is a character study, no?) Conrad put it better himself: “Fiction—if it at all aspires to be art—appeals to temperament. And it truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time.”
Where Conrad slips past landscaping and imagery, I wonder whether there’s not something of a world beyond the margins. That is, the sense we have as readers of a larger world only excerpted on the page (or more crudely some diagrammed backstory pinned to the author’s study, so he can make sense of characters’ histories prior to the novel and so on. Where’s an appendix when we need one!). I always thought Malraux was great at this foreboding, overwhelming sense of complexity. Reading La condition humaine, I think we sympathize with the characters because even we – no matter how attentive – cannot make sense of what we don’t know or what is denied to our knowledge. Empson’s points on the span of literature – say, Shakespeare’s dual plots intimately connecting court and roadside inn – might be helpful too, as the sheer disparity lends us to think that the interlocked fictional events somehow encompass everything ‘in-between’ (i.e. the world) as well. As long as we cover the president and the foot-soldier, in other words, we’re clear. Of course, the author may be as technically ignorant as ourselves of what’s precisely happening on the wings but there are interesting and deliberate ways to manipulate and use this feeling. ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘history’ catch at it but only just.
A more interesting point comes through this detour, I hope. Conrad of course knew several languages, and I believe he came to English as his third and fairly late as well. His prose always reminds me of a certain charming insecurity of talented polyglots, the need to get things right while wrestling with English’s awesome depot of synonyms, adjectives, and connotations. But this does not necessarily mean purple prose; rather, it’s the difference between ‘sunset’ and ‘the sun slipping down’. (Perhaps this is the ‘genius’ of the language? I’m thinking of Beckett’s decision to write in French and certain long German words; but it does well to remember every language has its complex terms which seem exotic or overwhelmingly complex in translation.) With it comes a sense of demonstrating mastery and command of the language: consider Nabokov or (perhaps more appealingly) Isak Dinesen. There’s an ungainly if effective style that piles on the adjectives, lingers on the senses, surprises us native-speakers with odd little apt phrases, and stumbles a bit qualifying psychology. And what follows is precisely ‘atmosphere’ and a corollary, almost accidental strangeness that only increases with the struggle regardless of the narrative structure or different voices. You can’t win against this python, nor yet is this necessarily a deliberate choice. It’s not like Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), an emphasis of texts as texts, or other post-modern hijinks. And all sorts of interesting rhetorical questions emerge and counter-examples like Faulkner, so maybe I’m not quite getting at it.
And there I am. The following posts should hew closer to the text, but I’ll be starting from these reflections. More to come and excited to start! ~ John
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